Mark Twain Quotes About Effort

• Success is a journey, not a destination. It requires constant effort, vigilance and reevaluation.

  Mark Twain

  Journey, Effort, Destination

• Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

  Mark Twain

  Children, Effort, Parent

• Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

  Mark Twain

  Inspiration, Effort, Special

• God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man.

  Mark Twain

  Men, Effort, Found

  Mark Twain, Louis J. Budd (1992). “Collected tales, sketches, speeches, & essays: 1891-1910”

• What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man? It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us. In youth we don't feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders. Humor? It is nature's effort to harmonize conditions. The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth.

  Mark Twain

  Grief, Humor, Fighting

  Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst (2009). “Mainly the truth: interviews with Mark Twain”, University Alabama Press

• I never could do anything with figures, never had any talent for mathematics, never accomplished anything in my efforts at that rugged study, and to-day the only mathematics I know is multiplication, and the minute I get away up in that, as soon as I reach nine times seven- [He lapsed into deep thought, trying to figure nine times seven. Mr. McKelway whispered the answer to him.] I've got it now. It's eighty-four. Well, I can get that far all right with a little hesitation. After that I am uncertain, and I can't manage a statistic.

  Mark Twain

  Science, Accomplishment, Effort

• I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way.

  Mark Twain

  Girl, Fall, Effort

  Mark Twain “Carnival of Crime in Ct”, Library of Alexandria

• I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Thinking, Effort

  Mark Twain (1994). “Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches”, p.342, Penguin

• If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.

  Mark Twain

  Men, Effort, Forgiving

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